Yearly Archives: 2009

Apocalypse Jukebox

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Whoops! I was wrong; one more music review. This is a longer article reviewing a book called Apocalypse Jukebox. Here’s an excerpt:

And in rock? Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it? There is no shared vision in the kind of critically acclaimed rock that Whitelock and Janssen are discussing. On the contrary, the whole point of the genius rockstar is a hyper-cultivated, hyper-marketed, endlessly fetishized individuality. The artists that Janssen and Whitehead have chosen to analyze are deliberately unalike — they use apocalypse in different, individualized ways. For Leonard Cohen, the apocalypse is a metaphor for his divorce; for Green Day it’s a metaphor for adolescence; for Devo, it’s a metaphor, contradictorily, for de-individuation and conformity. Regular folks may all go out the same when the fire comes, but each genius has a different end.

Whatever there other eccentricities, though, the daring individualists that Whitelock and Janssen love do share one trait in common: ambivalence. They’re all complex…or, if you prefer (and in the case of Michael Stipe, literally) inarticulate. Apocalyptic songs tend to celebrate the great simplification of the end — God will set your fields on fire, the traditional bluegrass lyrics insist; trying is not enough, notes Khanate. There’s not a whole lot of wiggle room there. But for Whitelock and Janssen, the apocalypse is yet another excuse to validate, not self-obliterating finality, but self-absorbed complexity.

This is probably my favorite thing I’ve managed to get published for a while. Not that anyone’s keeping track, but there it is.

Wednesday Comics

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There’s been a bit of a back and forth about Wednesday Comics after I snarked about them here.

I haven’t really looked at Wednesday Comics that closely, I have to admit…basically because it’s too much of a time and money commitment. I am interested in some of the creators (Kyle Baker definitely; Neil Gaiman and Brian Azzarello sort of; the Wonder Woman strip a little bit.) But there’s no way I’m going to the comics shop every week and spending $4 for a couple of pages of a couple of comics I might be interested in. Cost/benefit wise, it just doesn’t even come close. I sort of hope the Baker Hawkman comes out in a trade I guess…but otherwise, eh, I’ll live without it.

In general, I also find the whole project a little depressing. And the reason I find it depressing is precisely because, you know, this really is innovative. It’s a fairly ballsy effort to get a bunch of top notch creators working in an unusual format. It’s kind of going out on a limb in terms of delivery and marketing and aesthetics. By the standards of mainstream comics, it’s fairly visionary, I guess.

And yet…it’s also just incredibly staid. You’ve got all these folks who are supposed to be the best in the bizness with an exciting new format…and yet they’re using the same damn characters that are in all the other titles. And you’ve got the same kind of stories, pretty much, without much effort to adapt to the different medium — that is, serialized pulp, which, personally, I think is a pretty dumb way to go when you’ve only got a single page at a time. (It sounds like they’re trying to do something somewhat different with WW; more power to them.) And the gimmick, the hook, the nifty twist, is entirely aimed at the most insular audience possible. It’s all for people who are already obsessed with comics, right? People who go to the store every week, without fail. Even the title is a lame inside nudge — “Wednesday Comics — get it? Because comics come out every Wednesday!” I don’t know…I mean the old anthology titles (“Action! Amazing! Awesome Sauce!”) were kind of ridiculous, obviously, but at least they were trying to pander to a broad audience. Kids like action; kids like amazing; kids like awesome sauce. Who the hell likes Wednesdays especially? And, yes, I know the answer to that one, and, as I said, it’s depressing.

In short, for DC, “innovative and exciting!” doesn’t mean reaching out to a new audience. Instead it means taking a chance on crawling further up their own navels. And I’ll give them this; Wednesday comics looks infinitely better than Blackest Night or Marvel Zombies. Chalk one up for innovation. Yay team.

Comics of the Wack and Derivative

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With apologies to Tucker.
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Marvel Divas #1
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
Tonci Zonjic

Frank Miller’s always saying awesome stuff in those interludes just after he’s pulled his slobbery lips from Hollywood’s open syphilitic sores and right before he’s placed them onto Will Eisner’s spectral ghost-anus. And one of the awesome things he said was that comics can do anything. And I’ll go one even awesomer, and say that super-hero comics can do anything even better. Like, human rights organizations, for example; they’re always going on and on about how the Falun Gong are getting their organs torn out or boring people in Iran are being tortured like in Guantanamo or whatever. So fine, that’s good and all, more power to them…but wouldn’t it be cooler if it were comics, and you had Wolverine come in at the end with an intestine on his claws and quoting Hamlet? Or you could have Superman fly in and take a super-piss on Iran so everything would be green and the Ayatollahs would turn into Swamp Thing?

Marvel Divas is just the sort of story I’m talking about — pushing the boundaries of comicdom just the way Frank and the Ayatollahs were hoping. Y’know, some people say, “Super-heroes aren’t for girls.” But I say, super-heroes can date. They can talk about boys. They can be strong, complex women for the oughts, and by god, they can be just as poorly drawn as their male counterparts.

And hey, don’t forget about cancer. You know a story’s good when it ends with cancer.

Green Lantern #44
Geoff Johns
Doug Mahnke
Inks by scads of folks.

There are lots of great things about super-hero comics if you’re a pluralist. The best thing is that there’s so much plural, these days. I mean, heroes multiplying like bunnies, if the bunnies were zombies and pieces kept falling off of them and staggering off to fuck Batman to produce little zombie bat-bunnies who then tore out Hawkman’s heart! With the elongated penis of a transgendered clone of Little Veronica! From Archie!!! That’s the fucking shit, man! Because nothing screams horror like random super-heroes wandering around a Green Lantern title talking about how they used to be dead but now they aren’t and this one represent Hope! and that one represents Will! And this other guy is as strong as Superman and he’s complaining that everyone forgets that because they’re not reading enough fucking comics! I want more heroes, I want more different lantern colors, I want more panels of heroes explicating their powers in third person like when the Flash says, “The Flash doesn’t fly.” I want Green Lantern shouting from the rooftops, “Green Lantern doesn’t have regular bowel movements, but saves his shit up all year for one big dump!” Thus the term, “Blackest Night.” Or maybe he could say, “Green Lantern doesn’t use bad grammar!” Which is too bad, really; bad grammar is something we could use more of as long as we’re not being elitist. As it is, it seems like only the African-American fellow gets to say “ain’t.”

Marvel Zombies 4
Fred Van Lente
Kev Walker

This is exactly the same comic as the previous one, except better. For the following reasons.

1) Hellcat says, “There’s something about you bad boys that makes me go all creamy inside.” I think she was responding to her boyfriend, who just tearfully confessed that he had cancer. At least, I hope so.

2) This comic has a summary page. Printed in dark red type against black in tiny, tiny print, so that it’s virtually unreadable. And, of course, when you do read it, it doesn’t make any sense. I appreciate it when that kind of care is taken to confuse me.

3) Moebius the living vampire has been reading old Steve Gerber comics, and actually says out loud, “And whatever knows fear — burns at the touch of the Man-Thing!”

Wednesday Comics #1-4

Everybody says I should look at these. So okay, I picked one up and ripped it right in half because it’s put together backwards or inside out or something. What’s with that? If I want a newspaper — oh, never mind, nobody wants a newspaper.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, so then I’m trying to read it, and I was kind of interested because I’ve never heard of this Wednesday superhero, and I’ve even heard of Rocket Racer. But no sign of either of those guys, just a bunch of the same tired old heroes…and they don’t even stick with one for more than a page. First you’ve got Batman talking to Gordon, and then you’ve got Flash running around with Gorilla Grodd and then you’ve got Metamorpho I guess. I mean, I know I said those other comics didn’t make any sense, but these go to a whole new level of what the hell — there are even different artists every damn page. Fuck this pansy ass, oh-so-intellectual William Burroughs cut-and-paste shit. If you’re going to do that, I want to see heroin and flying infectious libido flies, right? I mean, okay, Gordon’s fucking the bat signal one panel, the Flash is addicting everyone in the world to crack at super-speed the next, Wonder Woman’s binding Jack Kerouac with his own nose hair to a flatulent Amazonian kangaroo — I could pay for that I guess. But $3.99 for a bunch of disconnected scenes that keep trying to get a story off the ground and failing… Do I look like I’m made of money? Screw that.

I put it at the back of the rack so the store-owner wouldn’t notice it was torn, naturally. After I pissed on it. I really had to go, and there were a bunch of Dark Reign crossovers I hadn’t seen yet. What? Oh, “Comic stores should be kid friendly! They should be woman friendly!” Whatever. When I go to a comic store, I want a locker room. Period.

Animal Man #3
Gerry Conway
Chris Batista/Dave Meikis

Now this is more like it. Young turk Gerry Conway tells us what it’s like to experience a mid-life crisis, super-hero style. Losing your powers, wife’s upset cause you’re never home, kids are distant, just like in that sad, sad Harry Chapin song — “you know I’m gonna be like you, dad!”

But mainly, now that you’re old and your peter is all wrinkled up like a tiny portrait of Philip Roth, you get to adulterously bang the bodacious co-eds — which in this case means Princess fucking Koriander, aka Starfire, aka Koooooooorrrrry.

Was that so tricky? Was that so difficult? All we really want from our comics is a tale of suburban malaise with the wet-dream pin-up from our drooling youth thrown in as a little cherry on top. When Stan Lee made super-heroes have real problems way back then? This was the whole point. This is the apogee of comics, right here. Go off with it, you and your little Philip Roth, into your suburban bedroom, and contemplate it closely.

Has anybody read Farah Mendelsohn?

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She wrote Rhetorics of Fantasy. An ad for the book says it “introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre” and utilizes “nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy.” Sounds interesting, but I haven’t read a lot of fantasy lately and don’t even know what the current classifications would be. Tolkein-style quest is still going on, I suppose.